The Last Stand of Gregor Naj
by metallover
Summary: During the forgotten first war for Armageddon one lone Guardsman, Gregor Naj, fights for his Imperium and his faith agains the forces of Chaos. A short story set in the world of Warhammer 40k; an updated version of a story I posted years ago.


**Author's Note**

**(DISCLAIMER: I do not own any names, places or anything else in this story. They remain property of Games Workshop and Black Library. This is a work of fanfiction and love; please don't sue me)**

**I just got through watching **_**Apocalypse Now**_**, and for some strange reason it made me want to re-work this short story. I'm fairly proud of it, despite the fact I wrote it during a slump in my creativity a few years ago. It just needed some spit-shine and a more epic name is all. Written in 2011; re-worked in 2013. **

**I've always loved Warhammer 40k, and my USB drive is chock-full of half-finished stories that just never panned out. The grim darkness, the bleak, dystopian future, the heroism of the brave men and women holding the lines against all odds… these are the stories that appeal to me. Don't get me wrong, stories of ten foot tall genetically engineered super soldiers appeal to me too, but the inherit humanism of writing the Imperial Guard is something that I always enjoyed; normal men and women defending their homes from the horrors of a Universe gone mad. I love it.**

**So read, review and enjoy!**

* * *

The Hive gates were dark. They were always dark; the levels above blocked out what little weak light reached the surface through Armageddon's noxious cloud-cover, and the gates were almost always closed; what traffic came into Hades Hive was usually from air or orbital traffic. The gates, ancient and monolithic, hadn't been opened in centuries.

The Imperial Guard of the Armageddon PDF stood in their neat, ordered rows behind barricades of stone and metal, dressed in their combat armour and distinctive rebreather masks, cradling their lasrifles, heavy weapon troopers igniting flamers or checking the feeds on their heavy bolters.

The gates shook with a tremendous impact.

The assembled Guardsmen shifted uneasily. They had all heard the stories and rumours of the atrocities perpetrated by the heretic army; whole communities in their thousands murdered in the name of the dark gods; vile rituals done in appeasement of their new dark masters; and massacring tens of thousands to their vile ends.

Another blow shook the gates, the entire Hive shaking with the impact.

Some men started to whimper like children; the air stank with warp-taint, a horrid, burnt ozone smell that pervaded everything. It was in their uniforms, in their masks; they were breathing it into their lungs, allowing the sweet scent of putrification to flow into them. What choice did they have? Men had to breathe.

Chaos had come to claim Hades Hive.

"Alright, men!" the Sergeant yelled at his assembled troops, the gruff older man's voice breaking. "We are the last line of defence between these heretic sons-of-bitches and our families!"

Naj looked up as he heard the Sergeant's false bravado.

"We are Armageddon's finest!" the Sergeant continued. "We are Steel Legion! We will hold the line!"

The entirety of the Armageddon Steel Legion 24th Imperial Guard regiment stood ready behind the gates of their hive, facing out to the Ash Wastes outside. The enemy would be crossing the wastes to reach Hades Hive, rather than risk an orbital or aerial assault; not while Hades' gun emplacements were still operative. But the defences around the ancient gates had decayed with time, forgotten as scavvie zombies and mutants took up residence in the lower levels, while human civilization built upon the ruins of its past, forgetting things that should not have been forgotten.

"Yeah right," the man next to Naj muttered bleakly. "All of hive Tempestora is marching towards us. We're all going to die."

Naj looked at the guy next to him. He looked to the man next to him. He looked like Naj. They all looked the same. All of them wore the same brown great-coats; all wore the same black and gunmetal grey gas-masks; and all wore the same foul weather hoods. They were all the same, hundreds of masked, waiting men, thousands of them assembled to defend their homes. Waiting for the end of their lives at the hands of the same men that they had traded with, the same men they had played over-ball with, the same men that had helped rebuild Hades hive after the fire that had reduced whole sectors of the hive to ashes ten years ago. These men were their neighbours; they were their friends. Now the men and women of Hive Tempestora came to eradicate all life in the name of their dark gods.

The man that had spoken jerked forward, a lasbolt exploding out of his mask's eye as he crumpled, dead before he hit the ground.

Naj stared at the corpse in shock for a moment, before looking up at the man's killer.

The Commissar looked down on the rest of the men crouched around the corpse from under his black peaked cap, his eyes steely and cold behind his mask's lenses.

"We hold the line, or we die," the Commissar snarled. "If you run, if you even question our impending victory, you will share this filth's fate. Am I clear?"

"Yes, Commissar," Naj and the men around him shouted.

The man nodded satisfied before moving off, hands clasped behind his back and his black storm coat flapping in the downdraft of the giant industrial fan above them.

Fear was the weapon of the Commissariat; elite officers outside the normal chain of command not opposed to sacrificing one man to harden the hearts of his comrades. Naj saw it as a pathetic waste of life, especially when they needed all the bodies they could throw at the heretics. But he would never say as much, or he would wind up like the poor bastard lying in the dust next to him.

Guardsmen did not question the Commissariat. They did not question their superiors. They pointed their rifles and shot where they were told, they marched and fought where they were told, and they died where and when they were told.

Naj's gaze snapped back to the quickly failing gates, dread growing in the pit of his stomach as his gloved hands kneaded the grip of his lasrifle, a cold sweat breaking out on his back beneath his uniform.

With a mighty roar and the sound of the sky falling to the earth the gates crumpled and fell, blasted aside by forces Naj couldn't even begin to comprehend. The heretic soldiers streamed into Hive Hades around the legs of great engines of destruction, bristling with cannons and festooned with spikes and chains, war horns honking like deranged beasts as the six-legged contraptions began opening fire on the Steel Legion.

The men from Tempestora came not in ordered waves, but in an all-encompassing and overwhelming horde. They weren't the killers that the Steel Legion had expected; they were just the citizens of Tempestora.

They weren't the citizens Naj remembered, though. All of them had stigma of some kind; horns, weeping sores, marks of the chaos gods cut into their skin; all of them sported radiation burns and sandblasted skin from traversing the ash wastes unprotected.

None of them were the men or women Naj remembered. All of them had fallen to madness and ruin.

"Send them back to their dark gods in pieces!" the Sergeant screamed, brandishing his chain-sword, the serrated teeth of weapon quickly rotating up to speed with a growling roar. "Charge! In the Emperor's name!"

Naj and the rest of the Imperial Guard screamed as one, and followed their Sergeant into the open gates after the retreating heretics.

Naj screamed and ran after the others, driven by a furious sense of unquestionable faith to kill the unbelievers that had dared blaspheme against the Emperor's glorious name. He was driven to kill the interlopers knowing that he was the only thing between them and his family, up in the residential levels above them.

The crowd of heretics had broken and were openly fleeing; some dropped rifles, masks, even the coats that they would die without the protection of in the ash wastes beyond. The great siege engines exploded, heavy weapons and Imperial tanks blowing their hulls open and reducing them to lumps of burning metal.

Cold, grey light streamed over the Armageddon 24th Steel Legion as they raced after their enemies through the giant gates that provided entrance to the hive and into the Southern Ash Wastes. Wind buffeted them as they raced out into the open, firing with reckless abandon to whatever they hit.

Naj puffed as he ran alongside others in his unit. They had the enemy on the run, now was the perfect time to –

Naj faltered as the man next to him disappeared in a red puff of blood and gore.

Three more men in front of Naj screamed as they were torn apart by giant calibre bullets.

Not bullets Naj realised with horror as he watched one enter another man with enough force to throw him off his feet. Naj almost seemed to see it all happening in slow motion as the man exploded from around the entry wound.

"Traitor Astartes!" someone was screaming over the vox beads in their ears.

Red armoured giants, bristling with spikes and skulls, strode forward, the archaic bolters in their hands barking and coughing death at any in their way, completely oblivious to the heretic forces fleeing around them; the Chaos Space Marines simply continued walking, crushing their own troops as they advanced.

Naj skidded to a halt, the men around him doing the same.

The Sergeant had been the first one hit. The Commissar went down as Naj watched, screaming through his breather as his legs were torn away by the insanely over-powered chaos weapons.

Naj watched as death itself closed in on them.

* * *

Naj ran as fast as his legs would carry him, his bulbous augmetic prosthetic of an eye whirring to focus in the dark light. The underhive flew by the guardsman as he ran.

He wasn't a deserter. There was no army left to desert.

The traitor Space Marines had annihilated at least ninety percent of the Imperial Guard stationed at Hades Hive. The last Naj had seen of the once glorious Armageddon 42nd Heavy infantry was a few other soldiers like him, lucky enough not to be gunned down, disappearing into the underhive ahead of him.

Escape to the underhive had been the only option. The Guard forces in the Ash Wastes outside of Hades Hive had been decimated. The last he'd seen of Major Carlyle the man had been screaming in pain from a chest wound, while a struggling corpsman tried to stop the haemorrhaging. His last words had been to sound a general retreat, before he lapsed into the silence of death.

The underhive was full of dangers and obstacles, in Naj's opinion, easily comparable to any death world that they saw on the vids. Broken conduits full of live wires constantly sparked, and moisture collected in broken pipes had promoted the growth of luminescent fungi. None edible, but it gave a soft light bright enough that Naj didn't need to exhaust his torch pack.

He found what he was looking for, a ladder leading from the underhive up to the residential district. It was old, and rust had eaten through it in places, but what other choice did Naj have? The normal routes to the upper levels would either be choked with refugees or else too dangerous as the enemy pressed further into the hive.

Naj slung his rifle over his shoulder, beginning to climb.

Most from the hab levels didn't know about the dark places in the recesses of Hades Hive, but Naj wasn't like them. He was born an underhiver, a ganger that had clawed his way up out of the constant turf wars and death, and found his way to the hab levels, where he had enlisted with the Arbites and met his wife. He had been conscripted when news of Tempestora's treachery had broken, but his knowledge of the underhive had saved his life more than once during his time as an Arbite, just as it was doing now.

The ladder shook beneath him, its ancient rungs groaning in protest as Naj clung to them, his heart racing. He was at least twenty stories up now. Almost there… He couldn't afford to die here…

The Guardsman mentally took stock of his weapons as a calming exercise as he climbed; hand over hand, reaching for the dim light above him. His trusted lasrifle held in his arms across his chest; a shotgun strapped to his back he'd liberated from the armoury trucks before entering the underhive; his trademark Armageddon rebreather, dangling from his belt, and his flak armour great-coat, currently flapping in the downdraft of another giant fan.

He breathed a sigh of relief as he threw an arm up over the ledge, pulling himself up to street level in the commercial district and simply kneeling, catching his breath and willing his heart to slow. He stood and began jogging, getting his bearings as he ran. He was close to home now, but the streets were abandoned. That was not a good sign by any reckoning.

Naj stopped in a recessed doorway to catch his breath and check for any signs of pursuit. A quick scan showed he was safe for the time being. His hands trembling, he somehow managed to pull out the pict of his wife Bethany holding his infant son they'd named after Lord Solar Macharius. Little Mach smiled in his mother's arms.

He had to find them and make sure they were alright; he had to find them and hide, make sure they survived the war. That was his only priority now. The hive was overrun by cultists and daemons, all that mattered was escape and survival.

Pressing the pict to his brow and offering a small prayer for the wellbeing of his family, Naj ran back into the empty street, in the direction of his hab block.

* * *

The habs were without a doubt, utterly destroyed.

Entire hab blocks were empty shells, gutted by fire or artillery rounds. Everywhere there were signs of a fighting retreat by the Guardsmen and PDF; spent, discarded clips for las or auto rifles, random bits and pieces, and an almost equal number of enemy and Guard bodies. Of the Imperial bodies there were markedly more, Naj noticed with a sad sigh; guardsmen lay dead with PDF and even the occasional Arbite, their distinctive black carapace armour making them easy to spot. Every so often the burning remains of a tank or a sentinel would present itself as a grim reminder about who was winning, or had already won the war.

Fortunately, his hab district seemed mostly intact. The bottom floor of the nearest building had obviously been turned into a bunker of sorts during the fighting; sandbag barriers blocked the entrance, and the windows had been boarded up. This was all blackened and charred; obviously someone had chosen to throw an incendiary grenade into the lobby to end its use by whichever faction had holed up in it.

He ignored it, running for his home.

Naj proceeded cautiously when he got nearer to his destination, putting all his stealth skills from a lifetime of fighting in the underhive to work, hugging shadows, dashing to cover, and staying absolutely still when any noise that could be an enemy was heard.

Taking agonizing seconds to check the coast was clear, he ran across the thoroughfare to his building, vaulting the barrier he leapt through the doorway, tucked into a roll and came up into a firing crouch, sighting down the barrel of his lasgun.

The room was empty. Inside was all the detritus of a battle; spent shells, discarded weapons, scorch marks, and plenty of blood.

However there were no bodies. Naj shuddered as he thought of what would take the corpses.

His heart beat like a hammer and his breath came in short gasps. His thoughts were solely on his wife and son, whom he'd last seen six months before at the muster fields as they tearfully waved goodbye to him.

He took the stairs two at a time, his gun held at the ready the whole way to the fifth floor landing. Now there were bodies, civilians that had been badly mutilated, turned into little more than piles of meat, bone and cloth by the mad hands of barbaric traitors.

The stench of death was everywhere, as were rats, crawling over the ragged corpses, bloated with the meat of Naj's neighbours and friends.

He gagged at the smell, only managing to hold himself back from vomiting with the thought that it would give away his position.

Tears were running freely down his face from his organic eye by the time he came to the door of his hab, and his hand was shaking as he typed the security code into the small panel. The door, which usually only took two seconds to open seemed to take an eternity.

The sight that greeted Naj tore his heart in two.

A slim pair of feminine legs stuck out from the kitchen area. His wife's legs, wearing the shoes he'd bought for her birthday a few months before his muster.

His gun clattered to the floor as he stepped into the hab, a rough sob tearing its way involuntarily from his chest as he walked into the small room and saw his life lying on the floor, mutilated almost beyond recognition.

He cast his eyes to the door of his son's room, which had been roughly kicked in. Blood was smeared in a blasphemous eight-pointed star symbol on the door, and Naj felt the last of his resolve crumble as he fell to his knees.

* * *

Naj looked up from his spot in the corner in the living area at the sound of something moving outside the hab. He looked back down to the pict of his family he held in his hand while his other one tightened on the grip of the slug pistol that had just been pointed at his temple, lowering it slowly.

The sound came again, closer this time, followed by guttural words in a language that Naj didn't understand. The words made the hair on the back of his neck stand up, and his hand on his pistol tightened until his knuckles went white, an involuntary growl escaping his lips.

Footsteps echoed down the hallway outside his hab, and stopped outside his open door, which Naj couldn't see from where he sat, contemplating his own death.

The traitor, his armour the same as Naj's, but adorned by daubing and symbols of the chaos gods walked into his hab, and something inside the guardsman snapped.

The traitor had a moment to register his surprise at seeing a loyalist guardsman before Naj, screaming the name of his wife, leapt to his feet and unloaded his pistol into the traitor's face.

Naj felt his heart harden as he raced the feet in the hallway to his lasrifle, still lying in the open doorway to his hab. He leapt and skidded along his stomach, reaching the rifle and turning it on the two startled traitors, screaming a wordless cry of rage and righteous hate. Naj had sworn to protect his world, and by the Emperor he would with his last breath.

The guardsman got to his feet and quickly and efficiently stripped the traitors of ammo for his rifle and shells for his shotgun and grenades, but didn't trust their ration packs, assuming they spread taint faster.

He stopped before he left to offer a prayer from the back of his little Primer for his wife and son, and set off to wreak havoc on the traitorous monsters that had taken his family. He would sell his life dearly for the Emperor, but not waste it by taking it himself.

"Most powerful and glorious Emperor," he began, kneeling next to the lain out bodies of his wife and son. "Who commands the winds and eddies of the galaxy, we miserable servants are adrift in peril, we cry to thee for help, save us or we will perish. We see how great and terrible thou art, we fear you and offer you our awe, we fear naught but your wrath, and beg the chance to prove ourselves, so let us not die in vain."

Hardly the most befitting prayer for his loved ones, but it was the closest to a benediction he could get. As an afterthought he added another, more personal prayer.

"Please, lord Emperor. Please, take them to your side."

Still kneeling down next to his wife, Naj gently took the ring he gave her off her finger, gave her hand one last squeeze, and stood. With one last look at his family, he threaded her ring onto the chain his dog tags hung on around his neck.

* * *

The streets were still empty when Naj emerged from his hab, dry eyed.

A few blocks over there was a small church that Naj and his family had attended. It was a little difficult to find unless the person knew what they were looking for, being tucked between to manufactories and beneath a storage silo, but the preachers were much kinder and gentler than the ones that were in the bigger chapels uphive, having been shaped by a life of hardship and poverty like the people whose souls they attended to.

Naj resolved to make sure it was still standing, and disappear into the underhive after he prayed for guidance first.

He made his way silently through the abandoned streets towards his destination, still not coming across any enemy patrols, or any other sign of life besides the three he'd shot in his hab.

The empty streets were beginning to make him jumpy, and his trigger finger was starting to become anxious for another target.

He reached the small church about half an hour later with nothing bigger than rats to shoot at.

As Naj came upon the church he dropped to his knees in front of it, staring at the edifice with more gratitude than he had ever felt.

The church was, mercifully, still entirely intact. The chaos forces must have missed it in their hurry to deface the bigger chapels and cathedrals in the more central areas.

Naj hurried and ran inside, barring the door and basking in the cool air inside the church, allowing the light from the stained glass windows depicting the Emperor and his Primarchs to play over his features. The quiet was like a balm for his tortured soul.

The church was empty, but inside it was also untouched.

As the light from the stained glass windows shone over his face, he looked up at the figure of the Emperor and understood why he'd been left alive. He understood why he had been chosen to live where his allies had died in the ash wastes outside the hive, and with grim determination, he began to break apart the pews and with a tool kit he'd taken from the back room, beginning to board up the windows and doors.

Before he went on, Naj decided to offer a small prayer to the Primarch Guilliman of the Ultramarines for strength. For some reason, though, it didn't feel right. Naj looked from window to window, fearing momentarily that the Emperor had deserted him, but as his eyes passed over the image of Leman Russ of the Space Wolves he felt his inner fire once again blossoming in his heart. Offering a quick prayer to Russ for strength and ferocity, Naj set to what remaining work needed completing to protect the church.

He hastily built a small defence point before the altar of the Aquila, and sat behind it waiting for the traitors to come, repeating over and over again the Prayer of Adulation to the Emperor.

He was still praying when the first heretics began making noise outside the church. Naj could hear rocks impacting against the stonework outside, and he heard the front glass windows shatter as the heretics screamed and whooped as if drunk.

He was still praying as the heretics outside starting making sounds of confusion as they realized the windows had been boarded up from within, and Naj continued praying to the Emperor as he knelt down behind his barricade, sighting down his lasgun, while his shotgun lay down next to him.

The sounds of some large-scale battle had been ringing through the underhive for some time; Naj didn't know for how long exactly, he'd stoped keeping track almost as soon as he'd had his epiphany. In his opinion, he'd been holed up in the church for almost ten hours.

There was a big battle going on, most likely uphive. A really big battle was going on, perhaps meaning that the Lord General had managed to regroup enough forces to drive the traitor guardsmen out of the hive.

Naj grit his teeth as the traitors started hammering on the door he'd reinforced with the old pews. He knew it had been an act of desecration, but what other choice did he have?

The banging stopped for a second, before the first shot was fired into the door. With grim certainty Naj knew this was to be his fate; to die protecting this house of the Emperor.

The first of the heretic's shots burned through the antique door lock. To Naj's satisfaction he heard the heretics roar in frustration as they smashed into the old door with no effect. The next few shots were just out of anger, random holes appearing in the door.

Naj gulped at what he knew was coming, and after a few long moments of silence dropped back into cover as a small explosion destroyed the small church's door, and sent shards of wood flying everywhere. To Naj's dismay, a number of the stained glass windows depicting the Primarchs were shattered, their serious countenances lying in shards on the cold stone floor.

Naj took a deep breath, and shouting his wife's name popped up and began shooting at the heretics that had started rushing through the gaping wound that was once the door.

He dropped them with precise shots that would have made his old drill instructor proud.

Before the next wave came in he set his lasgun aside and hefted his shotgun; its smooth lines and blunt stopping power made it a dangerous weapon, and at the moment Naj felt like a dangerous man.

The next heretics that walked through were slightly more careful, but were annihilated with one blast from the shotgun. The doorway was decorated with red gore, and Naj racked the slide with a savage grin of satisfaction.

The booming rapport of something heavy being fired startled Naj, and he ducked as a grenade landed in the church.

The explosion rattled his small barricade, and shrapnel rained down on him. In the wake of the blast Naj couldn't hear anything; all he could hear was ringing. He was shaking as he looked up to the altar of the Aquila.

The shiny brass eagle was pitted and dented from the grenade blast, but had yet to topple down. All of the windows featuring the Primarchs had blown out, all except for the savage Leman Russ, Primarch of the Space Wolves, swinging his axe while his head was thrown back in a perpetual howl.

With grim determination Naj ignored the multitude of small scratches and cuts that the shrapnel had left on him and resumed his position kneeling at the barricade, exchanging his old lasgun for the shotgun he'd left at the barricade.

This time the heretics were more cautious, stepping slowly over their fallen, advancing slowly through the clearing cloud of dust. They wore their Armageddon pattern rebreathers, and their coats were closed. They looked exactly like Naj, but they wore the foul symbols of Chaos hanging on their coats.

Naj took a second for the rest of them to come in, seven in whole, before pulling the trigger on his pilfered shotgun, blowing the seven heretics away in a storm of high-powered shot.

The answering hail of fire forced Naj to duck again, and with barely a second thought pulled the pin out of one of his grenades and threw it behind him out the door of the church, and was rewarded when the shooting stopped as the grenade exploded, and only began again half-heartedly a few seconds later.

Naj picked his lasgun up again and began firing back at the heretics, who could now be seen clearly through the door. He managed to drop another two before his lasgun clicked empty and a las-shot scored a hit on his shoulder and flung him onto his back.

The heretics shouted in unison at what they thought was a victory, and all charged towards the church, only to see a ragged, wounded guardsman rise from behind a shoddy barricade, one arm hanging limp and useless at his side, the other aiming a shotgun one handed towards the charging heretics.

His first shot blew the leg off the heretic in the lead, and his second blew a head-sized hole in another's chest before they started returning fire.

The first las bolt slammed into Naj's stomach, throwing him back two paces, before he brought the shotgun up one-handed again and blew the head off another heretic. Four more opened fire and a lucky shot took his already wounded arm off at the elbow, and spun Naj around.

He recovered quickly, and shouting again put the last two shells of his shotgun into the general direction of the heretic guardsmen.

By now the pain was making his augmetic eye blink and fuzz, constantly whirring to focus and compensate for his pain-addled brain.

Naj realized with a start that the heretics hadn't killed him, and looked up to see who could only have been their leader.

With a start Naj realized he was looking at his old Sergeant.

"You fought well," the Sergeant said. As he spoke his tongue flicked out; the tongue looked like it belonged to a snake or some other reptile, Naj noticed absently. Gone was the Sergeant's kind, stern eyes; all that remained were the eyes of a reptile, yellow and slitted.

"If you join us," he went on, "Our masters can make all the pain go away. Come on, Naj; for old time's sake? Not everyone gets this invitation, but you fought like a demon! You fought like one of us. Join us, Naj, and fight for the glory of the Blood God Khorne!"

Naj smiled, blood coating his teeth, and with his good arm drew his pistol and shot the Sergeant in the head before he could react.

"Thanks, but I think I'll pass."

As the las-shots and bullets riddled his broken body, Naj finally let go of his hate, and in his last moments before darkness took him his last sight was of the Primarch Leman Russ of the Space Wolves leaping into the fray, axe swinging, bringing death to all the heretics left standing.

* * *

Eyvind sniffed, tasting the air for scents of other enemies. His heightened senses relaxed as he decided that no rogue guardsmen were in the vicinity.

The Space Wolf moved quickly, taking in everything in a second, the dim lighting of what remained of the church's lighting fixtures bouncing off the many golden amulets he wore on his blue-grey power armour. A huge wolf-pelt swished through the air as he turned, covering his back and shoulders; his long unkempt red hair merging with the pelt and making him seem to be almost a part of the beast. He let his massive Rune Axe hang at his side, blood and gore dripping off the flawless blade of the axe.

"Brother Eyvind?" a sombre voice said through the vox bead in his ear. "What is the status of sector three?"

Eyvind put a finger to his ear, and replied in a voice like broken bricks being ground together.

"Relax, lad," he said to the Blood Claw, Eoril, on the other end of the vox. "All hostiles eliminated."

Casting a sad, solemn look down onto the broken body of the lone Guardsman that had protected the church, he added "No Imperial survivors."

There was a moment before the vox clicked again. "Acknowledged, brother. Wolf Lord Redmaw wants us to return to the staging area. There is much more for us to do before this world is won; they will sing sagas of us one day!"

Eyvind muttered a terse acknowledgment before hefting his axe over one shoulder and turning to leave.

On a whim, he turned back to the fallen Guardsman. He closed the space between them in two loping strides, and knelt down to the body, his wolf pelt brushing the debris strewn floor as he did. With a gentle care belying his huge size he closed the guardsman's one eye that still stared up at the ceiling. His stun-baton sized fingers gently reached out, carefully grasping the man's dog tags as he read the name, a small golden ring falling away from the tags, catching Eyvind's eye as it did.

"Rest easy, Brother Naj," he muttered softly. "Be at peace; be with your family. We will fight for you now. Wait for us at the Emperor's side."


End file.
